Interview

Jonathan Nossiter Takes on Kodak, Nike, and Chaos

by Stan Schwartz
(indieWIRE/ 02.08.01)

After his success with "Sunday" (winner of Sundance's Grand Jury Prize in 1997), Jonathan Nossiter is back with a provocative and ambiguous new film called "Signs and Wonders." Co-written with "Sunday"-collaborator James Lasdun, the film may be about an erratically troubled marriage and a concurrent destructive love affair. It may star Stellan Skarsgard, Charlotte Rampling and Deborah Kara Unger (all of whom turn in first-rate performances). But you simply wouldn't be talking about the movie if you didn't look carefully at the particular setting the director has chosen for his anxious, psychological examination: Athens, Greece.

Never has the teaming, chaotic quality of the Greek metropolis been captured on film (or in this case, digital video) with such a piquant mix of intensity and lyricism. In Nossiter's ambitious vision, the city, in all its political/cultural contradictions and complexities, becomes a vital character in the story being told, interweaving as it progresses an honest consideration of the American government's support of Greece's military dictatorship in the late '60s and early '70s.

The ever-eloquent Nossiter recently spoke to reporter Stan Schwartz about the signs and wonders of chaos and capitalism, the state of his career, and the state of film technology.

indieWIRE: What happened to you after the success of "Sunday"? Why did you choose the particular "post-Sunday" path you did?

Jonathan Nossiter: (laughs) I like the idea of choice and will that you're suggesting! I'm more of a believer in the random nature of actions and the consequences of those actions. Everything that happens in terms of the film world surprises me in all directions. I was shocked that "Sunday" got into Sundance and it seemed ridiculous that it won. And that has nothing to do with the inherent quality of the film. The constellation of events and personalities that it requires for any film to see the light of the day is so peculiar and so little based on inherent worth. All this stuff is completely serendipity. I was very lucky - but luck also runs out. And sometimes luck also continues. Who knows if I'll ever be able to make another film again. But yeah, definitely stuff opened up after "Sunday" -- but with a degree of caution. Winning Sundance forced certain people in Hollywood to at least make a courtesy call on me. There was definitely what seemed like some genuine response to the film. I don't know what else to say. I mean, I wasn't interested in doing "Batman IV."

iW: What about the question of reaching a mainstream audience?

Nossiter: I'd love to reach as wide an audience as possible and I tried, for better or for worse, with "Signs and Wonders" to try and pursue the things that interested me. But also, see if there was a way to find a story line that would have a larger resonance. Whether that is going to be the case or not, I have no idea. [And that] has to do with me and the way the film turned out, which fortunately you can never predict. Which I think is spectacularly good, [the fact] that you have no idea. I can only believe that not knowing what you're doing is a good thing, since I don't know what I'm doing.

iW: You honestly believe you don't know what you're doing? You're being somewhat glib.

Nossiter: I'm being semi-disingenuous, but only semi. Obviously, you don't spend three years of your life losing ten years of your life, which is what it takes me and I think a lot of other people to make a film -- unless something pretty strong is burning inside you. And I feel ten years older. ["Signs and Wonders"] was an unbelievably difficult film to make, in some ways much harder than "Sunday."

iW: How so?

Nossiter: It's a more ambitious film, logistically, in human terms, in technical terms. The scope of it, in every way, is larger. "Sunday" was waging a guerilla war and this was waging a tactical war. It required mobilizing forces from Greece, from France, from Sweden, from America, from England. And you know, shooting under conditions of considerable duress, along side Mexico City, [Athens is] perhaps the most difficult metropolis.

iW: But you at least had a larger budget than on "Sunday."

Nossiter: Certainly, but not with the sort of luxury of being able to pad yourself -- which is what I wanted. I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. The point of shooting in Athens was to try and throw myself and the actors up against a kind of overwhelming reality. And that's what happened and it was pretty damn overwhelming. Every day was virtually uncontrollable.

iW: How did the actors deal with it all?

Nossiter: Stellan and Charlotte are really amazing human beings. They threw themselves in to the chaos of Athens, into the chaos of the streets. Often, it was me and them and the camera on my shoulder and the soundman, and the four of us would just go, and there'd be 40 people trying to trail behind us. There's almost a kind of carnal delight that they took [in it all], because they are fully alive human beings. These are not actors who believe that they are anointed by God to be pampered and act as marionettes, or worse, to act as belly-clearing artistes. These are fully alive human beings fully engaged in the world around them. Which to me is the greatest blessing of the film, the fact that Stellan and Charlotte were curious at every moment. It was a full exchange with them every day. It wasn't, "Oh gee, okay, lets do the dialogue." It was a complete and absolute collaboration. And they were as interested in their relationship to the city as characters as I was.

iW: What is this on-going relationship with Athens you have?

Nossiter: Pornographic. No, seriously. I first started going there when I was 3 or 4. We were living in Paris and my Dad was a journalist and was especially interested in Greek politics. This was right before and during the military dictatorship. So he went often, and I guess the shreds of my political consciousness to some extent were formed by these trips that he took and that we often took together as a family. So growing up in Europe and constantly going to Greece, this was an important place for me. And I studied Ancient Greek in university. There's something quite insular about Ancient Greece, which I think is quite beautiful. (laughs) And I lived with a Greek woman for five years! But Athens is a city that has struck me for a long time as a kind of peculiarly modern hell. But it's the hell that I think lurks in any Western city. Essentially, if you took away the faзade of New York skyscrapers or Haussmann's Paris, you would find Athens. This absolutely anguished, aggressive, anxiety-filled concrete monstrosity, almost imploding from the energy of its own anxiety. This is what is has meant to live in a modern, contemporary urban Western context.

iW: I'm reminded of the Mall in the film. . .

Nossiter: Yeah, it's the kind of projection of where urban life is going. That Mall is actually 45 minutes outside New York in Nyack, and is to me absolutely a vision of the end of the world. You know, the film opened in Berlin, in Potsdamerplatz. It's horrific! There are all the requisite McDonalds and Starbucks right opposite the main theater. And if there's ever been a more perfect symbol of the capitulation of political beliefs, ideology, the notion of urban space as a reflection of what people actually think and care about into one mono-ideology of consumerism, it's fucking Potsdamerplatz.

iW: Is this a political rant I'm hearing?

Nossiter: Maybe it is, I don't really care, because I feel it. But what I think is the most dangerous thing, and this is what we're trying to look at in the film, is -- in a world like this -- what happens to people's private lives? Their intimate relations? How do we love each other? How do we exchange tenderness? To make love to someone, to give love, it can't exist in a vacuum. So what happens when we live in a world which is determined by McDonalds, Starbucks and Nike and in which human individuality is being crushed? When this happens in the larger context, of course, it's going to have a devastating effect on our personal lives. Why the hell are we in such chaos in our personal lives? These things are related, and on some level in the film, we tried to look at this. The relation between external physical space and internal emotional space.

iW: The inevitable question about your use of digital video . . . thanks to Lars von Trier, it seems like most people think of Dogma when they hear the words digital video . . .

Nossiter: And this couldn't be further from our film. . .

iW: And yet some people might argue that carefully composed and lit, painterly shots using a tripod is a betrayal of the aesthetic . . .

Nossiter: I was a big fan of "The Celebration" and a bigger fan of "The Idiots." Because we live in a world of such tremendous conformity, I'm happy when anyone says a collective "fuck you" and tries to do something different. Any genuine attempt to dissent from conformity I really applaud. That said, I'm not at all interested in Dogma, the inherent aesthetic of it, or really dogma or fanaticism of any kind. I'm a failed painter, so I'm most excited in movies and their relationship to painting and in trying to work the image with as many tools as possible at your disposal. Kodak has [now] produced a film stock of uniform sleekness that gives almost every film a kind of advertising look. Obviously there are still beautiful films being made by people who are clever enough to manipulate backwards or sideways these film stocks, but by and large it's very difficult now. If you look at a film like "Eyes Wide Shut," it looked to me like Kubrick was using every ounce of his imagination to degrade the film stock to make it look like video, and I can tell you personally it's one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen, visually. So short of Kubrick, you're fucked, if you're dealing with Kodak. But I don't really give a shit about technology, in and of itself. It has no meaning. People have meaning. And I wanted to convey something about the people in a certain context. This is a film about obsessive people struggling with great anxieties and great desires in the middle of an urban chaos. I did not want it to look like a Coca Cola commercial or a Nike commercial.

iW: I read your decision to go video was fairly last-minute . . .

Nossiter: Totally. I started to freeze frame on TV the scouting footage shot on mini DV and take 35mm stills of it just for a shot list. And I looked at these photographs and there was a strange expressionist beauty to them. Gone was this photo-realist, hyperdetail of contemporary film stock [which is now] so technologically advanced, you can see detail deep into the frame, even with minimal lighting. Even on the lowest budget indie films, there is a profusion of detail but there's no distinction, no variation of meaning being assigned. Everything is visible now, but is that the point of making films, of painting paintings, to make everything visible?

Signs of the times

Jonathan Nossiter digs deep in "the grave of Western civilization"

BY JASON ANDERSON
EYE

Even while labouring under the effects of a head cold, Jonathan Nossiter comes across like a passionate, intelligent guy. He's the sort of filmmaker that other filmmakers might envy -- he's handsome, worldly (his father was a journalist and he grew up in England, France, Greece and his native U.S.) and has a sexy sideline career as a sommelier, creating wine lists for several trendy New York restaurants. His film career had an auspicious beginning with Sunday, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1997.

But as we talk over lunch at Kalendar a few weeks ago, it's clear the 39-year-old filmmaker is feeling pretty raw. He's in town to talk about his second feature film, Signs and Wonders, which Nossiter describes as "a strange meeting of psychological thriller and a fable without a moral." The dependably intense Stellan Skarsgard plays Alec, an Americanized Swedish businessman in Athens whose attempts to read greater significance into the disorderly details of his life cause him to trample the emotions of those around him, including wife Marjorie (a mesmerizing Charlotte Rampling) and lover Katherine (Deborah Kara Unger).

Interwoven into this personal story is a larger political one about the destructive effects of American cultural and corporate imperialism, with the crowded, decrepit Athens presented as "the grave of Western civilization rather than the cradle," says Nossiter.

The weekend before Nossiter's visit, the movie had opened in the U.S. Most reviews were not kind -- the New York Times called it "Fatal Attraction shot with a camcorder," while Variety said it was "sufficiently disastrous to reinforce belief in a sophomore curse."

"Some of them openly said this is an outrageous example of crass anti-Americanism," says the New Yorker. "But then, we're living in McCarthyite times. There's a very definite, identifiable strain of jingoism, even from so-called liberal people. It's like Alec in the film -- they have no ability to see themselves. I believe Americans are essentially well-intentioned people who have no idea of the devastation and de-struction they wreak in the world, and they're fundamentally blind and unwilling to come to terms with any criticism."

I suggest that the way the U.S. has chosen to deal with the chaos and unruliness of the rest of the planet is to make the rest of the planet look and act like the U.S.

"That irony is a lot of what the film is about," says Nossiter. "In my naivete, I thought there'd be a segment of people in America who'd be delighted to see this taken on as a subject. It's been the opposite. I've been raked over the fucking coals."

He might sound bruised, but he's happy Signs and Wonders has been well-received elsewhere in the world. And it's definitely a tough film -- thorny, aggressively weird and doomy. It mixes up anti-globalist politics and sexual obsession to ambiguous, occasionally baffling effect. While it might strain some viewers' patience, it's rarely less than fascinating.

It's very much a film out of its time, with more in common with paranoid '70s thrillers like Alan Pakula's The Parallax View or Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now than any contemporary films. It even looks older -- Nossiter chose to shoot the film on digital video not to emulate the rough style of the Dogme posse but to get the combination of rich, saturated colour and grainy texture he loved about colour films in the '70s. "With the super-slick Kodak film stock and their monopoly," he says, "it's very hard to make a film that doesn't look like a big commercial."

Moreover, he's right to believe that the political issues the film explores are all too serious and pertinent, like the U.S.'s continued readiness to deal with dictators if it means the flow of capital remains uninterrupted. Nossiter also worries deeply about the looming extinction of foreign cultures as more and more of the planet is conquered by Hollywood, Ronald McDonald and the values these new gods espouse.

"People have to realize that this is not some abstract political and cultural issue," says Nossiter. "This has a direct impact on your private life, your personal life and your ability to love and exchange love. This is not all about 'Gee, I don't like globalization, I don't like to eat at McDonald's.' It's about how we live our lives now. This film is very much about human relations and trying to see them in a larger context.

"The presence of mall culture or McDonald's-ized/homogenized Athens is not an architectural or landscape problem -- it's a human, personal problem. It will affect how two 15-year-old kids can or can't find a way to make love to each other, how to exchange tenderness, how to be alive and sentient and, eventually, how to construct a substantial love affair. You can't do that in a culture that's dominated by McDonald's. How can you go to a huge mall and live and express yourself as an individual with complicated desires? You can't, because you're being channelled.

"This is active evil," Nossiter says, pounding the table to emphasize the last two words. "It's not passive. It's having an active force on how we live our lives. I think it's terrifying. It's like a virus that's taking over the world and people aren't even aware of the degree to which they're infected."

Signs and Wonders may not be a cure to that virus, but Nossiter's attempt to inoculate viewers is a worthy one.

DIRECTOR'S CHAIR: Jonathan Nossiter
On His Emotional Thriller Targeting Love, Athens and Homogeneity

By Annlee Ellingson

Two days after the presidential election last November, as the U.S. was getting an education on the intricacies of the electoral system, BOXOFFICE interviewed filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter about his film "Signs and Wonders," an "emotional thriller," as he calls it, about an American living in Athens who rediscovers his love for his wife after leaving her for another woman. Unexpectedly, the post-election confusion was an ideal context in which to discuss some of the larger themes in his film such as Western consumerism and globalization.

"The film tries to look at what is the personal, intimate dimension to larger political concerns," he says. "For instance, the terrible price of homogenization [and the] globalization of environments. It's not just that things start to look ugly and look the same and look like advertising and everyone can go and live their lives naturally. There's a natural emotional and psychological consequence in people's intimate lives.

"If you're a 15-year-old kid and you're starting a romance with someone, and you're doing it in a public park or you're doing it even in a diner from the '50s, that has a certain quality and environment to it. You're going to be able to express those first little longings of love and tenderness in a certain way.

"If you're sitting in a mall in a McDonald's eating toxic food in a toxic environment" -- as the film's adulterous couple does -- "how do you start to express those first longings of love? I think there's a direct relationship between the environment and our inner lives."

T he virtual tie at the voting booth, Nossiter says, illustrates the sameness that now dominates our culture. "People who say that we live in a post-ideological era are completely wrong," he explains. "We live in an era in which there's one dominant ideology. It doesn't mean that there's no ideology. Bore -- Bush/Gore -- is a perfect expression of that."

Immersed in such an environment, Nossiter's main character Alec (Stellan Skarsgard) searches for meaning in it, and the director developed an aesthetic theme of glass and mirrors as he was shooting the film that reflects Alec's "obsessive need" to look. "The story is about obsession, and it's about an obsessive need to look and to try and understand what you're looking at," Nossiter says.

"In a place like Athens, it's very brutal, and what happens in a physically brutal environment like that is that it's really hard for people to look at each other directly, and it's very hard for people to deal with each other directly. As a natural consequence, you start to find yourself being a little furtive. The camera in a sense is trying to follow or to express what the humans are doing in any given scene."

Nossiter also made the aesthetic decision to shoot in digital. "What I wanted to arrive at...was a very lush look," he says. "I was interested in maximum manipulation of the image. I'm a failed painter, so I get my revenge by making films. I care very deeply about getting as rich and lush and visually complex an image as possible."

But again Nossiter was challenged by homogenization -- this time of the medium. "Ironically, because of Kodak's monopoly on film stock now and because of the way they've transformed the film stock into slick advertising material, it means that there's a uniformity in the way films look, and you get a gratuitous photorealism. It's very difficult to combat that. If you're actually interested in the human and physical texture of an environment, then you're at a real handicap.... By shooting in video, ironically because of a bunch of breakthroughs technologically at the time, I felt that I could actually arrive at a 35mm image that was more expressive and had almost a painterly quality."